Thursday, January 13, 2011

Stranding and a teaser

An amazing thing happened yesterday: for the first time ever as I sat knitting on the subway, I looked up and saw another person knitting on the subway!

Other people noticed too and I started to have visions of a knit-in-public day in which people just turned up places knitting without talking to each other - a random appearance of knitting people, sort of like a flash mob before you figure out they're all in it together.

(then of course we got off the subway in the same place and immediately started chatting. And because it turned out we were taking exactly the same route for most of the rest of our journeys, we got other people chatting with us too.)

(she was knitting a scarf in brilliant blue mohair on 10mm needles, which means she's pretty much a hero.)

I wasn't knitting my clockworky hat on the subway as it requires concentration, but rather another simpler thing I still managed to mess up during all the chat - today's job is to rip back two rows without crying. Still managed to strand some more of the hat though, from about here:

It's coming along, but you can see what I mean about choosing a contrast colour that matches one of the self-striping colours perfectly. Not so much of a contrast.

While doing all the stranding I have been thinking of what I have learned about this technique in my knitting life. I did colourwork for ages before Kathi asked me to knit a sample for her Fair Isle book, but actually doing that project -which you may recall I dubbed Big Project Small Needles and wrote about many, many times last spring without posting any spoiler pictures - I learned so much more.

How to keep my floats perfect,

what a difference it makes when you consistently keep the same colour in front as you work,

3 comments:

I agree, pure evil, but I did order the book. I need another knitting book like I need a hole in my head, but order it, I DID! Maybe there will be a reality tv show about knitting book/yarn/supplies addiction and I can be on it. Those pictures are truly beautiful.